Dr D.G.Hessayon, who died in January aged 96, will go down in history as the most successful gardening author of all time, despite never having appeared on TV or done a book signing.
His ‘Expert’ series of more than 25 paperback titles, the first of which, ‘Be Your Own Gardening Expert’, appeared in 1959, accrued sales of more than 50 million copies(in 17 different translations) until they finally went out of print in 2014, casualties of the internet era.
The Doc, as his colleagues knew him, first rubbed shoulders with the garden industry when he joined Pan Britannica Industries (PBI) as chief chemist in 1955. He talked his employers (manufacturers of a host of top-selling products such as BabyBio plant foods and Toprose) into funding a new gardening guide on the understanding that if it flopped, he would repay them. Thanks to its down-to-earth no-nonsense, hands-on style, an emphasis on concise easy to follow text and detailed line drawings, it was a runaway success. When further successful titles followed, PBI were only too happy to assume the role of publisher, by which time he had climbed through the ranks from technical manager to manging director (and later, chairman from 1972 until his retirement in 1993).
He chose a deliberately old fashioned look for every ‘Expert’ book, each laid out to his own designs, arguing that substance was way more important than coffee-table style. His target readers were people who primarily needed their gardening problems solved.
On his retirement, Transworld took over as publishers, curating a series acknowledged as the UK’s best selling series of books of the 1990s. They estimated that one in three households owned an ‘Expert’ book.
The Doc’s achievements were widely recognised in both the book publishing and gardening worlds. In 1993 the RHS awarded him the Veitch Memorial Medal for his outstanding contribution to horticulture and he received the first Lifetime Achievement Award at the British Book Awards. The Garden Writers’ Guild handed him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005. He was appointed OBE in the 2007 New Year Honours.
Among his few personal appearances was a visit to a Garden Centre Association annual conference dinner during his 80s. His one and only book signing was at his local garden centre – an experience he later said he hated.
Despite his somewhat reclusive lifestyle, particularly after the death of his American wife Joan (a novelist) in 2001, the Doc was a keen self-publicist, sending out preview copies of each new title to journalists signed ‘Best wishes – Dave’. I can thus count myself among the owners of a greeting from a remarkable, enigmatic and influential figure in the history of our industry.
